VMware View 5.1 Released, with New Client Support.

What’s New in View 5.1

VMware View 5.1 delivers important features and enhancements that improve the performance, security, management, and flexibility of virtual desktops. This release of VMware View adds the following new features and support.

Advanced storage options that leverage vSphere 5.0 – The following performance optimizations and integration features take advantage of vSphere 5.0 enhancements:

View Storage Accelerator uses Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) – CBRC is an ESXi 5.0 server memory cache of common blocks. During peak I/O workloads such as logon boot storms, View desktops can access common blocks of the OS disk and shared applications in the main memory cache, improving performance, enhancing the user experience, and saving storage array costs.

Optional customer experience improvement program. View collects anonymous data about View usage to help make View more responsive to customer needs. No user-identifiable data is collected. You can opt in or out of the program at any time.

Install and Upgrade

In previous releases, you could not install View Transfer Server on a virtual machine that used LSI SAS or PVSCSI disk controllers. If the virtual machine’s guest operating system was Windows 2008, where LSI SAS controllers were configured by default, you had to ensure that the virtual machine had the proper disk-controller configuration (LSI Logic Parallel) before you began installing the operating system.

An error occurred after installing View Agent on Windows XP after a reboot.

View Administrator

Enhancements were made to allow View Administrator to support larger numbers of users. Now you can entitle a large number of users to pools.

In the German View Administrator, the last three pages in the Add Pool wizard for creating a linked-clone pool were blank.

View Client

In previous releases, for languages other than English, text might have been truncated in the Configure SSL dialog box of View Client.

If RSA SecurID authentication was enabled and you used View Client in local mode without a network connection, if you then reestablished a network connection and attempted to perform operations such as checking in the desktop or accessing a remote desktop, the client exited unexpectedly. Attempts to restart the client failed.

When a user presses Ctrl+Alt+Del in a PCoIP desktop session, the Ctrl and Alt keys are not released on the client host.

When a large number of desktops were running concurrently, some desktops displayed the following error dialog: “TPAutoConnect User Agent has stopped working.”

If the Enable RDP Auto-Reconnect View Client Configuration group policy is enabled, USB devices are not automatically reconnected to the View desktop after a direct RDP connection to the View Agent is lost. The USB devices are also not available on the client system.

Smart Card

Performance has been improved for smart card use over PCoIP when desktops have more than one vCPU.

View Persona Management

Files and folders specified as exceptions to the “Files and folders excluded from roaming” and “Windows roaming profiles synchronization” lists did not show up in the user’s desktop when a user logged in. For example, if you specified folder ABC in the “Files and folders excluded from roaming (exceptions)” group policy, and set the “Remove local persona at logoff” group policy, folder ABC did not appear when the user logged in.

View Composer

Under rare circumstances, it was possible that View Composer could enter a repeated polling loop during a recompose operation, which could result in an unusually long completion time.

If you migrated View Composer from one server to another server, and you stopped or uninstalled the View Composer service on the original server, you could not reconfigure the View Composer settings in View Administrator. This issue could occur if you stopped or uninstalled the View Composer service on the original server before you reconfigured the new View Composer settings in View Administrator.

When you created an automated pool of 100 or more desktops, View Composer did not warn you to limit the prefix name to 12 characters. In an automated pool, desktop names could be no longer than 15 characters, including the prefix name and the autogenerated number. For example, if you created an automated pool with a 13-character prefix and set the maximum pool size higher than 100 desktops, View Connection Server could not provision more than 99 desktops.

Miscellaneous

Under certain rare conditions, if connectivity between View Connection Server instances was temporarily lost, the resynchronization messages exchanged by the View Connection Server instances could fill up the JMS message queue, causing the View Connection Server instances to restart. “